Not to be outdone in their theological confusion of Lutheranism with liberal Protestantism, the LSTC faculty statement now introduces a philosophical howler:

“As academicians, the LSTC faculty is also in conversation with the research coming from biology, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary studies, and other disciplines that engage in gender and sexuality studies. This recent scholarship is clear that there are varieties of sexual orientations and gender identities; that these orientations, identities and relationships derive from a complex of cultural, historical and physical realities. The research alerts us to the precariousness of assigning to ‘nature’ what culture and community construct. Categories of binary differentiation such as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’ are historical and philosophical categories of great importance which nonetheless have minimal ontological status. As scholars, this faculty is and must be aware of this research which cautions us to be wary of the universality of binary sexual and gender classifications. Among many other things, that is why we must question many of the assumptions that are made in some of the circulated responses to the ELCA statements, ‘Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust,’ and the ‘Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies’—responses which depend on these problematic classifications of human experience and behavior.”

The philosophical argument here introduced claims to target “some of the circulated responses to the ELCA statements”; but this is not true. The LSTC faculty actually here argues against the text of Genesis 1:26, “male and female He created them,” and its interpretation in Augsburg Confession XXIII and the Apology (e.g., Kolb & Wengert, 62:5). “Genesis [1:28] teaches that human beings were created to be fruitful and that one sex should desire the other sex in the proper way… This love of one sex for the other is truly a divine ordinance” (Kolb & Wengert, 249:70). Their argument is not with us, first of all, but with the Bible.

A helpful discussion on the basis of actual Lutheran confessional theology, in any case, regarding how possibly to recognize same-sex couples in the context of Christian community, though not to bless them with the blessing of God in Genesis 1:28, could have been introduced here, since, in Melanchthon’s words, “the old canons also state that sometimes severity and rigor must be alleviated and relaxed for the sake of human weakness and to prevent and avoid greater scandal” (Kolb & Wengert, 66:16). This would mark a genuinely Lutheran line of reflection on what is undoubtedly an urgent pastoral need of our times. But such reflection is not even on the radar screen of the LSTC faculty, which rather instructs us in the latest scientific insight—namely, that being male and female is a cultural construct!

For God’s sake, even gays and lesbians are male or female. Excepting the minuscule  minority of hermaphrodites, of which Foucault made such a big deal, male or female is what each one of us is, and if “ontology” is about what things possibly are, then being male or female has the only kind of significance ontological statements can have as accounts of the general possibilities of being. To call this significance “minimal” is just confused. All ontological statements are exceedingly “minimal.” Minimal though it be, “immutable” heterosexuality (as Melanchthon puts it, Kolb & Wengert, 249:9) is what we troubled beings have been trying to make sense out of for ages, including contemporary gays and lesbians, in our constructions of gender. Gender, by contrast, as historically making sense of male and female being, is certainly mutable; here the idea of cultural construction properly applies to the multitude of interpretations of our ontological heterosexuality.

Just so a proper understanding of the phenomenon of homosexuality might arise, as a cultural construction of our ontological heterosexuality that has its provenance in late capitalist political economy. It would not then be a matter of genetic wiring; in terms of evolutionary biology, the notion of a “gay gene” is quite improbable. Rather, certain inherited traits may, given certain cultural constructions of gender, elicit experiences that form homophile identification by adolescence. Such exploration would be the proper critical work of interpreting contemporary science in normative Christian theology, not the capitulation to the Zeitgeist recommended by the LSTC faculty members.

Why does this philosophy matter theologically? The psychoanalytic consensus (the putative scientific consensus a generation ago) was that homosexual orientation was produced in children by abusive fathers or seductive mothers. I don’t know, and neither do today’s scientists know, in this highly politicized atmosphere, what the truth about the psychogenesis of homosexual orientation is. The argument is far from over. The biblical writers in any case also knew many possibilities for sexuality: polygamy, temple prostitution, gang rape, Greek-style pederasty and adult homosexual male love, lesbianism, incest. It's not that the Bible doesn't recognize the range--it certainly does--but actively makes a choice and declares which kind of the many possibilities within sexuality is God-pleasing.

True adherents of the Lutheran Confession know that theology which obeys the Second Commandment not to take God’s name in vain dares not to bless as God’s good gift and creation what in fact may have been the product of abuse. Romans 1:18ff inclines us to this view, that homosexuality is one of the disordered consequences of universal idolatry, exchanging the natural desire for the other sex just as the creature has exchanged the natural desire for the true God who is Other than the creature for images of created things. Pastors, who look and see through the lenses of the Scriptures rather than say it must be so on the basis of the Zeitgeist, learn in the confessional that much of what goes by “sexual orientation,” particularly in confused and frightened adolescents in this highly sexualized culture, is ambivalent. Pastors must in all cases be free to challenge the self-interpretations of their people—especially those which are not spontaneous expressions from individual depths but gendered models found in culture (including those of “gay” and “lesbian”) and adopted to make sense out of being male or female, especially when the gender models make matters worse.

Paul R. Hinlicky is the Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.